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Anyone else checked out the new VS 2013? If you aren't going to be buying it or don't have a way to get it free, you can always check out the Express editions (which have a new naming scheme now, like "Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web" instead of "Visual Web Developer Express 2013"). I have a bit of work to do this weekend so I don't know when I will be able to check it out, but one thing that has already kind of confused me was a change to the New Project menu where ASP.NET MVC 5 is under a choice just called "ASP.NET Web Project", and all of the older ones that actually list the version number are under a choice called "Visual Studio 2012". This is one of the first times VS did not give the new version number in the New Project menu, which made me think for about 15 minutes that I needed an update to get it. I finally found in a tutorial that ASP.NET Web Project is both Web Forms 5 and MVC 5.

I probably wont mes with it for a bit. 2012 has what I need and the company pays for it.

I never understood the difference between express and non-express editions.

I've used Visual Studio (c++ to be more precise) in the past, i've used 2008, 2010 and i recently downloaded the 2012 that it's called "Visual Studio for Desktop" for some reason.

Also, i can't really see what they improve, or what they add new to each version... for my programming needs (not top ones ofc) all i need is either in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2099, 30385 etc etc.

Just a "new" version, that`s all. Some new functionality, mostly for enterprise users/developers though. Adding support for this and/or that framework and support for this and/or that protocol. You could probably still use VS05 without any problems, it runs quite fast and it doesn`t have the &^*%& big collapsable menu`s.

However, I do like VS'12. I don`t know why, but it runs quite smoothly and the background can be changed to a dark theme which is quite nice, since my eyes get tired after programming a while, especially looking at those bright backgrounds.

All in all, the changes are not that dramatic, I don`t mind, as long as they keep support for their older versions for a reasonable ammount of time. I reckon '12 will be supported for a while. If i`m not mistaken, '10 and maybe '08 are still supported as of yet.

It is largely about working with new versions of the frameworks and technologies that VS handles. But they do add new features. The biggest for VS2013 actually isn't in the IDE, though (that may be a first). That would be Visual Studio Online. I have not had time to check it out yet, though I do have an account for it. It may be cool, as it is a hub of cloud developer services. And I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about VS2013's interface has really cleaned up the Metro style that 2012 went towards. 2012 was just slightly ugly looking, but 2013 has been prettied up significantly.

And the difference between the Express versions and the commercial ones are more the extended features. The commercial versions have more profiling features, more database management features, more advanced debugging for things like threading, etc. But if you just open VS, write code and run it, Express will perform almost exactly the same as the commercial versions. If I didn't get VS for free, I would be using Express. Express includes good debugging, good project management, can open DB connections, has Intellisense, and generally has everything you would need in it, but just not maybe everything you would want. Oh, and Team Server version has many team management and collaboration tools in it, but there is now even an Express version of it. I have not checked it out to see what all it includes, though.

Oh, i think for my needs Express is very good... The deepest i went with Visual C++ was a simple platformer using allegro. So it worked just fine.

Xaleph wrote:However, I do like VS'12. I don`t know why, but it runs quite smoothly and the background can be changed to a dark theme which is quite nice, since my eyes get tired after programming a while, especially looking at those bright backgrounds.

Oh, I forgot to mention that themes have become much more integrated in 2013, and they all look much better. The dark theme looks great now (there were some issues with the interface and some odd choices in 2012 with the Dark Theme).

I just downloaded it. As I learn Java, I also want to learn C# (basically I want to learn OOP and whatnot from java, as well as the syntax, but also the syntax of C# for mobile development and game dev in general). I wish there was VS for Java though. Def one of the reasons I am studying C# is VS.

At various points in history, VS could actually be used for Java, back when Sun and MS had an agreement. MS would allow Java development with VS (just not using the trademark, and calling it Visual J++), and MS would pack the JVM with IE (gotta love our acronyms). But MS broke the agreement by making Visual J++ incompatible with the JVM, thus only allowing it to run on MS's own runtime. Sun sued, the agreement was ended, and C# was born from Visual J++. There was a small, short-lived intermediate language called Visual J# that was designed to be temporary to support developers changing from Visual J++ to .NET, but support for it was ended in .NET 2.0.

Nope sorry it's a bit different (at least in my opinion). Microsoft added features specific to Windows, and Sun said Microsoft was not allowed to extend Java and therefore Microsoft had to go away from it. It's not really Microsoft issue here, it's more Sun which was short minded and didn't accepted that somebody could extend Java in its own way. Personally I would be in favor of opening Java a lot more than it is. It is by no mean open source in the sense you can't do whatever you want with it.

Could be MS trying to kick or Sun trying to stop MS, at the end, the good thing is that MS was forced to stop its J++ and create the .NET environment which is in my opinion (again) the best framework a maker ever made. Sure it works only (correctly) on windows, but if you don't mind this limitation it's simply amazing.